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Album review: Green Day – DOS!

The second instalment on Green Day’s trio of albums, DOS! landed last week. After the first album in the series I had high hopes the band had returned to their thrones as the Kings of Pop Punk. After Billy Joe’s public meltdown I was convinced that the aging punks still had the acid in their gut to produce the kind of music kids could get off to. Now it seems like it was a once-off shot of greatness and an inflated ego mixed with narcotics…

The lead-off track, See You Tonight, is not what I would’ve hoped for. It’s frankly a little shit. A folky inspired minute that seems like a throwaway track, not an album opener at all. Don’t know what they were thinking there.

Fuck Time, the second track, would have been a far better choice as a beginning tune. It’s slightly blues-influenced – as bluesy as a pop punk band can be – and it’s about exactly what the title suggests. Sex and Rock ‘n’ Roll… Apparently Billy is taking care of the drugs on his side… Stop When the Red Lights Flash, is a solid offering too. Fast, chaotic and melodic – a perfect back-to-back track duo.

Stray Hearts is a ska-inspired ditty. I hate ska. Not Madness or any of the early 80s bands like them, but the weak-as-hell white boy suburban pop stuff that polluted the air in the 90s. And the surfer culture seems to cling to it, even though it’s made by guys who wear poor boy hats and wear thick rim glasses. The only people that can listen to that shit and claim they actually like it without even a hint of sarcasm are surfers that have water in their ears permanently.

Nightlife… What can I say about this track? There is a reason that everyone considered Pretty Fly for a White Guy to be the song that officially marked the spiral down the toilet bowl of The Offspring’s career. Nightlife is not only a bad song, it’s a fucking horrible song. I wish this track never happened. I can’t even listen to it closely enough to make out lyrics for fear of what I might do.

DOS! doesn’t inspire the same kind of excitement I felt when I first heard UNO!. It’s okay in its own right but just doesn’t seem to hark back to what made them great. There are some prize moments, but that’s the problem though – there are only moments as opposed to the surges of brilliance that you want out of an album.

The album doesn’t put them straight back in to the U2-esque category that they held in my mind before UNO!, but it doesn’t quite continue their rise to greatness either. It’s a stall, maybe a hiccup. But then, maybe it’s a sign that a slide back towards being totally irrelevant again is inevitable. Only time will tell, but right now Green Day is sitting on the fence between winning back old fans and losing them forever and ever.

Regardless, this album has some surprises and some great songs, so check it out if you still want to complete the set. This just won’t be the go-to album out of the three, in my opinion.

P Blood

Suffering from an inexplicably large ego and ignoring common courtesy, Mr P. Blood indulges his opinions about whatever comes to his cesspool of a mind, and strangely people don’t seem to hate him for it. Making him a writer, of sorts.